I was sitting on the steps to my house with my friend Evan. We were about 2 or 3. There were hundreds of ants on the sidewalk below us. Evan reached down and started smushing them. I turned to him and told him to stop: “How would YOU feel if you were an ant and someone smushed YOU?” A patronizing lesson in empathy… Interestingly, I had open heart surgery around the same time and spent days in the hospital, but this memory is much more visceral. Love this question.
